"Boy, them dogs are in a place, too," says Baker. "Way across that swamp. You know it?"

"Oh, yeah," grouses Holden. He switches on his headlamp, which lights a grin as wide as the gibbous moon overhead. "Don't this suck like a bucket of ticks." And we're off.

In the dark, Alabama's big woods fly past. We cross field ditches and pastures, blast through hardwoods, tear brush pants on rusty barbed wire. We chase the dogs down cow paths and deer paths but mostly down no path at all. In the light from my headlamp beam, I catch pieces of the landscape-wet forest bottoms layered with oak leaves, streams unning clear over broken mussel shell and cobble, fingers of wild grapevine that claw at my face.

We break out on the edge of a pasture covered in a fog dimly lit by moonlight. Beyond a line of cedars silhouetted in the mist, a knoll rises from the creek. Rowdy and Ox are there, treed, incessantly barking. Headlamp beams slash across the oaks and hickories high on the ridge, as other hunters scale the bluff. Just a few weeks before, Baker tells me, he hunted a raccoon that climbed an oak growing on a bluff like this one. Pushed by the dogs, the animal ascended the tree, ran out along a branch, and stepped out onto the rising ground. "This country," he says, "will fool you."

I wade a swift, clear stream that reaches nearly to my knees and start climbing, grasping saplings to pull my way skyward. At the base of a giant red oak, Rowdy is "stretched out": back paws on the ground, front paws on the tree, shredding its bark with his claws. His barks are clanging bells, loud enough to hurt my ears. Aark! Aark! Aark! Aark! Aark! He is frantic. Rowdy circles the tree on his back legs, standing as high as my shoulder, flanks and muzzle streaked with blood from a cut from some thorn or old wire, muscles corded, eyes flashing in my headlamp, spittle and bark flying as he attacks the tree. Aark! Aark! Aark!